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Ps: This site is monitored but not actively posting on a regular basis. Mostly these are stories & some photos saved from a defunct site known as Verdun Connections which was on MSN Groups initially then on a social network called Multiply.

Friday, March 11, 2011

By now you know about the 8.9 quake that hit Japan

Tsunami Alert for New Zealand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Hawaii, and others. Waves expected over the next few hours, caused by 8.9 earthquake in Japan.

This warning appears on the Google front page,today,the tsunami will not be as big as projected for the westcoast of Canada or the great states of Washington ,Oregon & California

I saw this on breaking news last night,and it's amazing how much film footage they had almost immediately.........loss of life is rising in Japan..

9 comments:

It seems there are 4 Million People without power,...........................that's a lot of people in the dark. that would be the equaivalent of half of Quebec without power, or the whole Province of BC. -bear in mind Japanese people are quite well educated in earthquake preparedness....

A series of random photos showing some of the damage created by the huge quake & Tsunami Imagine if this was your neighbourhood ? Hard to really grasp that, but look out your window & visuallise all the homes gone & buildings down & maybe a ship or two or three parked on your front lawn.

Wow , I do not know if this is even possible but apparaently the Island of Japan was moved by 8 feet... Really imagine a whole country moved by 8 feet ? Here is some of that info: Quake moved Japan by 8 feet: USGS(AFP) – 16 hours ago

WASHINGTON — Japan's recent massive earthquake, one of the largest ever recorded, appears to have moved the island by about eight feet (2.4 meters), the US Geological Survey said.

Friday's 8.9 magnitude quake unleashed a terrifying tsunami that engulfed towns and cities on Japan's northeastern coast, destroying everything in its path in what Prime Minister Naoto Kan said was an "unprecedented national disaster."

The quake and its tectonic shift resulted from "thrust faulting" along the boundary of the Pacific and North America plates, according to the USGS.

The Pacific plate pushes under a far western wedge of the North America plate at the rate of about 3.3 inches (83 millimeters) per year, but a colossal earthquake can provide enough of a jolt to dramatically move the plates, with catastrophic consequences.

"With an earthquake this large, you can get these huge ground shifts," Earle said. "On the actual fault you can get 20 meters (65 feet) of relative movement, on the two sides of the fault."

He said similar movements would have been seen for Chile and Indonesia.

In December 2004, a 9.1 magnitude quake off Sumatra caused a tsunami that killed an estimated 228,000 people. An 8.8 quake off the coast of Chile in February 2010 killed more than 500.

There was not a similar ground shift in the 7.0 earthquake that devastated Haiti in February 2010, Earle said.

"A magnitude 7.0 is much smaller than the earthquake that just happened in Japan," he said. "We've had aftershocks (in Japan) larger than the Haiti earthquake."

Kenneth Hudnut, a USGS geophysicist, said experts read data including from global positioning systems to determine the extend of the shift.

"We know that one GPS station moved (eight feet), and we have seen a map from GSI (Geospatial Information Authority) in Japan showing the pattern of shift over a large area is consistent with about that much shift of the land mass," he told CNN.